Writer. Reader. Medievalist.

About

Dr Mary Flannery is a scholar of medieval literature and cultural history. She is particularly interested in the history of emotion and in fame, gossip, and deviant speech in late-medieval literature and culture (c. 1200-1500). Her first book, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Boydell & Brewer, 2012), identifies the subject of fame as key to understanding the poetics of fifteenth-century England’s most important author. Currently, Mary is completing a book on shame and gender in medieval literature and culture, a project supported by an Early Career Research Fellowship at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion (held between August and October 2013) and a Subvention Tremplin from the University of Lausanne.

Mary was educated at Claremont McKenna College and at the University of Cambridge. While a graduate student at Cambridge, she co-founded the Medieval Reading Group (MRG) and designed, developed, and co-founded Marginalia, the MRG’s online journal, both of which were supported by funds from a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Research Training Grant. She has held posts at the University of Lausanne, Queen Mary, University of London, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where she co-curated a 2009 exhibition entitled ‘Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David’.